Remember that one time Courtney Cox got married in 1999 and became Courtney Cox Arquette and as a joke, the Friends cast and executive producers all had Arquette added to their last names in the opening credits? That was pretty funny.
To be fair, that headline actually means "to take his wife's name with the same relative level of ease that a woman has in changing her name upon marriage instead of having to go through a lot of court and publication shenanigans."
"One or both parties to a marriage may elect to change the surname by which he or she wishes to be known after the solemnization of the marriage... [to] (i) the surname of the other spouse; or (ii) any former surname of either spouse; or (iii) a name combining into a single surname all or a segment of the premarriage surname or any former surname of each spouse; or (iv) a combination name separated by a hyphen, provided that each part of such combination surname is the premarriage surname, or any former surname, of each of the spouses."
"(b) Every application for a marriage license shall contain a statement to the following effect:
NOTICE TO APPLICANTS
(1) Every person has the right to adopt any name by which he or she wishes to be known simply by using that name consistently and without intent to defraud.
(2) A person's last name (surname) does not automatically change upon marriage, and neither party to the marriage must change his or her last name. Parties to a marriage need not have the same last name.
(3) One or both parties to a marriage may elect to change the surname by which he or she wishes to be known after the solemnization of the marriage by entering the new name in the space below. Such entry shall consist of one of the following surnames:
(i) the surname of the other spouse; or
(ii) any former surname of either spouse; or
(iii) a name combining into a single surname all or a segment of the premarriage surname or any former surname of each spouse; or
(iv) a combination name separated by a hyphen, provided that each part of such combination surname is the premarriage surname, or any former surname, of each of the spouses.
(4) The use of this option will have the effect of providing a record of the change of name. The marriage certificate, containing the new name, if any, constitutes proof that the use of the new name, or the retention of the former name, is lawful.
(5) Neither the use of, nor the failure to use, this option of selecting a new surname by means of this application abrogates the right of each person to adopt a different name through usage at some future date."
"Married persons; civil union partners. Upon marriage or civil union, each of the parties to a marriage or partners in a civil union shall declare the middle and last names each will use as a married person or civil union partner. The last name or names chosen may be any middle or last name legally used at any time, past or present, by either spouse or partner, or any combination of such names, which may, but need not, be separated by a hyphen. The middle name or names chosen may be any middle or last name legally used at any time, past or present, by either spouse or partner, or any combination of such names, which may, but need not, be separated by a hyphen."
Other state law citations: GA. CODE ANN. § 19-3-33.1 (1999); IOWA CODE ANN. § 595.5 (2001); LA. CIV. CODE ANN. art. 100 (2002); MASS. ANN. LAWS ch. 46, § ID (1991); N.D. CENT. CODE § 14-03-20.1 (1996).
In Marriage, Men are Taking Women's Names, By "The Writers", Man Repeller
http://www.manrepeller.com/2015/11/men-taking-womens-last-names.html
I happened across this article tonight while waiting for my cue in my theater troupe's dress rehearsal of Much Ado About Nothing (I'm an understudy and we're having a special understudy performance this Sunday!). I'm writing this on my phone so forgive any lack of polish. The casual discussion between the two writers in this article is surprisingly traditional for an article on a site named Man Repeller but very insightful.
I particularly like this exchange:
"Amelia: If you had the chance now, do you think you would ask Abie to take your name?
Leandra: I don’t think I would. I’d feel uncomfortable. That’s telling isn’t it? Maybe I’m old-fashioned
Amelia: Old fashioned in that specific category, sure, but then again, getting married is old fashioned. Having your dad walk you down the aisle while you’re wearing white is old fashioned. But it’s also kind of modern because these are things that still happen.
No one’s thinking about your virginity when you wear white
No one thinks your dad is selling you off for political reasons when he walks you down the aisle
What’s cool is that now, doing these things is a choice because we have the freedom to do whatever the hell we want."
The comment section is also full of little jewels like this:
"Chandler Dunn: I think tradition and stigma have a lot to do with women taking the man's last name, and I wonder if it is because we subconsciously see women, or really any person being proposed to, as the one being invited into something. I think we subconsciously forget we are creating something, not joining."
Basically, it's a short but delightful read. Go check it out!
Although my primary research interest is in the history and culture of surname changes at marriage around the world, I will be reading and writing about other books, articles, and other forms of media more focused on marriage culture and history generally as well. This is partly because I have yet to find any books actually focused on name changes specifically and partly because the subject is super interesting in its own right.
What is this book about?
This book traces the history and evolution of marriage throughout the world, with a bit more of an emphasis on Western societies in Europe and America, particularly toward the later chapters. It's incredibly well researched and takes a very in-depth, mostly chronological look at the purpose, laws, cultural significance, economic place, and religious status of marriage in the environment of each time period while weaving in quotes, anecdotes, and snippets about related topics from primary sources and literature. This style of weaving in an impressive amount of facts into each page works well for me, but I could see that this might become overwhelming to someone less incredibly nerdy.
Who would love this book?
If you're a history, trivia, or sociology lover, you will love this book. If you're someone who's engaged and wants to learn a ton about the institution into which you're entering, you may want to read this book. If you're engaged and you really don't want your starry eyed balloon dreams of marriage to be punctured by reality, don't read this. :)
Warning: this book is very academic in nature and quite dense. Though it does generally use colloquial language and you by no means need to be a college graduate to read it, we are talking 315 pages of probably size 10 font text. I really loved this book and it still took me a few weeks to get through. That being said, it really has informed my understanding of marriage thoroughly. I could write hundreds of posts using this book as a resource. I'm resisting the urge to do so (although you may get "tens" of posts instead).
My Favorite Parts
Is it possible to say that the entire book is my favorite? I've only had my copy for about a month and it's already lovingly bedraggled, filled with folded pages and highlights. Even writing this brief review has taken far longer than it should because in flipping back and forth trying to find my favorite parts, I've become reabsorbed in its pages and taken a few detours to write more blog posts on its contents and schedule them for the future. To be fair, I do have ADD and am very good at losing my train of thought and getting distracted by shiny things (thus, why I'm currently working in a Starbucks to try to get away from all the distractions at home), but this book is still insanely fascinating.
I do think the part of the book that has had the most impact on me is the emphasis on the economic nature of marriage. In the middle ages and Renaissance it wasn't seen so much as the entree into adulthood as something you entered in only after you had some economic steadiness. Some women even had to work to fund their own dowries. As a result, it was common for peasants to get married fairly late in life. Sometimes these marriages were even put off until after the female partner bore a child, so that her fertility and ability to provide future employees in the form of children was assured. Once married, the couple worked as partners together to make their household and prosper; women did tend to work out of the home (although honestly, the majority of men did too, until the industrial revolution), but the amount of work needed to run a household and perform necessary economic tasks like spinning, sewing, cooking, etc. meant that these contributions were quite valued. It was only in the Victorian ages and after that the concept of the "traditional male breadwinner" marriage really came about and women's work at home became devalued (Sidenote: SO much of what we consider "traditional" about marriage has existed for less than 200 years. SOOO MUCH. Honestly if you think it's a very old tradition, it's almost certainly not.).
The two entirely different chapters on marriage in medieval times - among nobility and among "the other 95 percent" - really offer an interesting look at how different these groups' goals and priorities were. It's also very enjoyable to read some of the discussion of the place of same-sex marriage in America at the time of this book's publication in 2005 and realize how far we've come now that it's legal nationwide. :)
Does it talk about marital surname changes at all?
Aside from a brief mention of Lucy Stone and her husband Henry Blackwell which doesn't even discuss her decision to keep her own name, no.
Amazon Link: https://www.amazon.com/Marriage-History-How-Love-Conquered/dp/014303667X
I really, truly love puns to the bottom of my being. They're one of my favorite things. Because of this, I love the heck out of wedding hashtags and would love to have one (in fact the idea of getting to come up with a wedding hashtag about taking his last name is so entertaining to me that that is actually a point in that option's favor), but.....John? Not so much. The following conversation has actually happened:
Me: "If anyone ever calls me 'Mr. John LastName' I will divorce you on the spot." (this is a whole 'nother issue that will be discussed in a future post)
John: "If anyone uses a hashtag for our wedding, I will divorce you on the spot."
We were both kidding, but also were pretty serious about our strong objections to both things. So. There you go. I suppose we're not having a wedding hashtag. However, they are pretty interesting, so I'm going to talk about them anyway.
"Ace of Hashtags" by Roberta Cortese (satyrika on Flickr), used under a Creative Commons License. https://www.flickr.com/photos/satyrika/8093127848
The Origins of Hashtags
The symbol itself - formally known as the Octothorpe but also called a number sign or pound sign, dates back to ancient Roman times. A New Yorker article called "The Ancient Roots of Punctuation" states:
"The story of the hashtag begins sometime around the fourteenth century, with the introduction of the Latin abbreviation “lb,” for the Roman term libra pondo, or 'pound weight.' Like many standard abbreviations of that period, “lb” was written with the addition of a horizontal bar, known as a tittle, or tilde... And though printers commonly cast this barred abbreviation as a single character, it was the rushed pens of scribes that eventually produced the symbol’s modern form: hurriedly dashed off again and again, the barred “lb” mutated into the abstract #... Though it is now referred to by a number of different names—“hash mark,” 'number sign,' and even 'octothorpe,' a jokey appellation coined by engineers working on the Touch-Tone telephone keypad—the phrase “pound sign” can be traced to the symbol’s ancient origins. For just as 'lb' came from libra, so the word 'pound' is descended from pondo, making the # a descendent of the Roman term libra pondo in both name and appearance."
The specific use of the symbol in a recognizable "hashtag" way is a lot older than you might think! A Lifewire article on the topic noted: "The metadata tags have been actually been around for quite some time, first being used in 1988 on a platform known as Internet Relay Chat or IRC. They were used much then as they are today, for grouping messages, images, content, and video into categories. The purpose of course, is so users can simply search hashtags and get all the relevant content associated with them." According to Lifewire, a resident of San Diego started using the hashtag #sandiegofire on Twitter (which launched July 15, 2006) to inform people about the ongoing wildfires in August 2007; other articles indicate that the first suggestion of # as a tracking tool to Twitter came from Chris Messina. This blog post by Stowe Boyd is believed to be the first one to actually coin the term "hashtag."
You can now use hashtags to track or group posts on a common theme on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, or Pinterest. I'll admit that I mostly use them sarcastically (as in the above headline or in my commonly used #blessed), but I do actually use them on my personal Instagram to track my ongoing photo chronicling of all my nail polish shades via #naileditproject (however, you'd have to be friends with me to see those, so it's really for my own personal use rather than to commune with others).
"Hashtag Coffee #coffeelover" by DoSchu on Flickr, used under a Creative Commons License. - https://www.flickr.com/photos/doschu/28908948920/
Here Comes the Hashtag
Buzzfeed attempted to track down the first people to use a wedding hashtag, and concluded from researching old twitter posts from June 2008 that it was a man named Jon Bohlinger. A few more mentions were made of the trend in 2008, then it started taking off more in 2009. A Pinterest spokesperson told them that there was a more than 800% increase in pins featuring "wedding hashtag" on their site between July 2015 and July 2015.
I used this blog as an excuse to reach out to Ariel Meadow Stallings, the publisher of one of my favorite websites, OffbeatBride.com. She said she first started really seeing wedding hashtags back in 2013, first with Twitter (pointing me to http://offbeatbride.com/seattle-boathouse-wedding/ as an example) and then with Instagram (http://offbeatbride.com/wedding-instagram-hashtag/).
If you can't come up with your own brilliant hashtag, there are a million wedding hashtag generators out there now (according to weddinghashtagwall I could use - #RachaelLovesJohn #AdventuresofRJ or my fave #DicksonandLorenzenMerger, or ooo since we're both lawyers we could be #DicksonLorenzenLLP BUT I WON'T BECAUSE JOHN IS A GRUMP*). Someone even started a business creating custom wedding hashtags for people. Offbeat Bride has a fantastic article talking about ways to come up with more unique hashtags that incorporate those awesome puns I was talking about earlier.
They really are a pretty powerful tool at this point - Several websites exist now to track hashtags and provide you with various analytics on them. I just used keyhole.co to search #weddinghashtag and got the following results for the past two weeks - 69 posts with 55 users using it, reaching 160 unique users. If you're keen on conglomerating your posts leading up to your wedding and all your guests' posts and pictures in one place, using a hashtag and a service like this would help you pull from all the various websites your guests might post on.
Also, just for your entertainment, this article "Best Wedding Hashtags Ever" from Brides.com is pretty hilarious. <3
*Actual photo of my fiancé.
I do not own this photo. Please don't sue me.
"After the Norman invasion, old Saxon customs, including those regarding names, were replaced with Norman ones. Populations increased and larger cities grew while the list of possible first names was quite limited, resulting in confusion and the increasing need for some other means of identifying individuals. Surnames therefore became more common in thirteenth and fourteenth-century England. Adding to the necessity of more precise names, the state began to require a way to identify and regulate its citizens. Kelly argues that early naming conventions also developed as a way to shape and structure citizens’ lives to correspond with the dominant culture, a purpose which is still extant today.
The use of surnames was quite flexible and inconsistent until the 1500s, however. Names themselves were chosen by the bearer, sometimes according to local laws. A 1465 law, for example, dictated that every Irishman living within specified districts should 'take to him an English surname of one town, as Sutton, Chester, Trynn, Skryne, Corke, Kinsall; or colour, as white, black, brown; or arte or science, as smith or carpenter; or office as cooke, butler.' Names changed quickly and easily through the fourteenth century, and reflected a person’s trade, personal and physical characteristics, or residence more often than their paternity. As a result of this flexibility in name choice, members of the same family would often have different surnames, and those names would frequently change throughout one’s life. John Smith could have a daughter named Maude Weaver and a son named Henry Short, who may also be known as Henry Hill if he lived on a hill, or Henry Johnson as the son of John.
Surnames gradually began to be hereditary in the fourteenth century due to state registration of citizens requiring more naming consistency. As Kelly points out, many of the common English names of today reflect important functions of fourteenth century life. Yet surnames were not universal or firmly established in all parts of England even by the early 1700s. Indeed, the British royal family itself had no surname at all until 1917 when they adopted the name Windsor, apparently as a means of distinguishing the family from the Germans during World War I. Surnames, therefore, developed out of a combination of 'custom, convenience, and law.'
The surnames of women in particular have not been well documented, which essentially writes females out of history as their ancestry is so difficult to trace. Evidence suggests, however, that girls were given names such as Alice Tomsdaughter, but these names were largely lost in time because English custom developed such that women tended to adopt the surnames of their husbands. Yet it is also clear that there were exceptions to the norm; historically, if the wife inherited property, then her husband and children would take her last name in order to attach themselves to the estate. Tuttle argues that the purpose of this was to ensure that the family and future generations might be “deluded” into believing in the consistency of the male line. With time, however, the law imposed further restrictions upon women’s ownership of property, so that eventually only males were permitted ownership by law. This effectively ended the practice of men taking their wives’ names at marriage.
Although westerners tend to think of our naming structure as set in stone and as representing the only reasonable approach, not only did these structures vary within our own culture over time, but worldwide many other practices have abounded. There are still no surnames at all in many non-western societies. “Matronymics,”or the practice of naming after the maternal line, exists in modern Spain, medieval England, and amongst medieval Arabs and Jews. Indeed, in medieval England children were often given the names of their mothers, or assumed them voluntarily, even when they were not illegitimate. In some cultures, surnames are narrative and are neither patrilineal nor matrilineal."
Excerpted from: Deborah J. Anthony, A Spouse by Any Other Name, 17 Wm. & Mary J. Women & L. 187 (2010),
Because why not?
Carrie Underwood's official music video for 'Last Name'. Click to listen to Carrie Underwood on Spotify: http://smarturl.it/CarrieUSpotify?IQid=CarrieULN As featured on Carnival Ride.
Jumping off my post from Monday, check out the actual wording of some of these marital surname laws that have been in place in China. Keep in mind that I'm only using English translations here, so it's entirely possible that some nuance may have been lost in the transition.
Full info here: http://chineseposters.net/posters/e15-594.php
The Civil Code of the Republic of China (1930) Article 19 - "If the right to the use of one's name is unlawfully infringed, application may be made to the Court for the suppression of the infringement and for damages."
The New Marriage Law (1950, People's Republic of China) - Article 11 - "Both husband and wife shall have the right to use his or her own family name." Also, check out some more of the propaganda posters from that time period supporting the precepts of the law.
Second Marriage Law of 1980 (People's Republic of China) Article 14 - "Both husband and wife shall have the right to use his or her own surname and given name."
More info here: http://chineseposters.net/posters/e15-591.php
"We know of only one society in world history that did not make marriage a central way of organizing social and personal life, the Na people of China. With that exception, marriage has been, in one form or another, a universal social institution throughout recorded history."
From Marriage: A History, by Stephanie Coontz
I'm becoming incredibly obsessed with this book. It's simply fascinating.